


la sorcière et l'inquisiteur

by theviolonist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hogwarts Founders Era, Origin Story, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:10:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A kid playing in the gravel a few paces away is throwing pebbles at the woman boredly, shrieking from the top of his lungs, "Burn the witch!"</p><p>Sophie rolls her eyes, smiles, a private joke with herself. "Please. As if they haven't tried."</p>
            </blockquote>





	la sorcière et l'inquisiteur

Children in the streets all have stones in their pockets. It's the age of burnings: they're not taking any chances, lest they find an adulterous woman on the way home from work. An adulterous woman: that's only one of the things Sophie's mother is, and she has the bruises and the loneliness to show for it. (But she also knows how to mix plants and how to speak to snakes, so she survives, barely, by the skin of her teeth.)

Like all great villains, Sophie is born in the mud. The sky overhead is roiling with dark clouds, pouring cold rain in blue slivers. Her mother's thighs are stained with blood. She'll hear the story later, much later, from someone who happened to see the whole thing and didn't rush to help, too busy with more important matters, marking down the seconds for the sake of capital-h History. 

By the time of Sophie's first shriek breaks out of her throat, her mother's back has hit the mud.

So those are the first things Sophie Slytherin sees: mud, and blood. 

 

—

 

The orphanage is bleak and grey and filled with dirty children and other undesirable creatures. Sophie doesn't talk to anyone out of sheer disinterest for the misadventures of grey-faced orphans, which probably also explains why she forms a friendship with the snakes of the house as soon as she discovers her ability to talk to them. At least they have something to say, be it only tales of what it feels to slither through the dirt and steal secrets from their owners in pure impunity. 

They're the ones who give her her last name — the snakes. She slides belly-down under one of the miserable cots, her nose in the dust, and she asks them, "What's my name, then? Do you know?"

"Slytherin," they answer without hesitation. 

A tiny brown and golden adder curls around her wrist, scales shining like a precious bracelet. It mayb be — she won't be able to remember in the future — at that precise moment that Sophie decides she will not end up like so many of the children here, discarded or stuck as apprentices in metal shops or fish stalls, whores littering the damp pavements of the city. She'll be the exception: she'll rise above the filth and get real jewels for her wrists, power to reduce places like these to dust. 

(It's also before she learns that that's nearly impossible — but a Slytherin never goes back on a promise.)

 

—

 

At eighteen she is a young witch; she seeks out of her own and finds them in mud-crusted dumps and haunted houses, stirring nauseating potions meant to rid common women of their ill-gotten children and their sores. Sophie tries to exult them, but they don't listen: so young, and a girl too, what does she know about the world? They still burn witches in this country. 

Sophie has always been curious for death, the private and painless death of insects underfoot and the vulgar agony of thieves caught in the street and speared uncleanly through: she goes to a burning. She doesn't look away for the whole length of it, untouched by horror or even pity: instead she manages to think of twenty-seven ways the woman could have undone her binds and risen above the fire. They need discipline. They need someone to lead them. They need someone to _teach_ them, most of all.

"Too bad they never kill the real witches," a toothless woman next to her in the crowd says under her breath.

Sophie can't help it; she laughs.

 

—

 

The orphanage burns in a fire. Not long after, Sophie starts working in a shop whose owner, in addition to preparing the most alluring meat pies of the whole region, is also a fellow sorcerer, and willing to teach her a few tricks. The price is sometimes despicable, but Sophie does her best to cast her mind off it. _Learn the trade,_ she thinks. _Sharpen your weapons. Then you'll kill him._

He teaches her charms and metamorphosis, and how to use her cleft tongue for useful purposes. At her demand, they also develop an array of tricks that transform her into a man, shifting a few pounds of flesh so that she can walk in the street without getting jeered at, call out practitioners with an authority they'll respect. He is tall and handsome, with something crooked about him, in the nose and in the mouth; he shares her wide forehead and flat lips, and the aristocratic neck she has in common with some of the nuns from the Ursuline Convent in the next town over, rejected from their families because of unmentionable sins or, even worse, their lack of suitors. 

"What name do you want to give him?" her master asks her once, as she perfects the angle of her wrist to make her eyebrows bushier.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you are different, in the guise of a man. You have a different heart. You should have a different name, too."

She smiles. Yes — there is something crooked here, too, like a puzzle piece that doesn't quite fit. 

"You're right," she says. 

She bends to the ground. The rats look up at them, their eyes minuscule black marbles, but she snarls at them. It's not them that she wants. When the snakes lazily slide out she grins at their army of yellow eyes. 

_What's my name?_ she asks, enjoying the slide of the words on the tongue; it's honey, honey and clover. 

_Salazar,_ they answer without hesitation. 

"There you have it," she tells her master, and goes back to brushing her beard. 

From then on she goes by the name Salazar Slytherin, when she is in man's apparel; in her woman's clothes the villagewomen know her as Sophie, the witch who wouldn't burn. 

 

—

 

Two years into her apprenticeship Sophie grows powerful enough to crush her master's cloying attention along with all the bones of his wand hand. On the same day, she decides she's had enough of the countryside and heads out to London, cradling the scraggly wand in her palm. It jumps in her hand, unwilling to submit to its new owner, but she is as cruel and resolute as she is young and eventually the dark wood abates, lies flat against her skin. _One victory,_ Sophie thinks.

London is a bustle and even dirtier than Cambridge was, the clouds lying heavy over the buildings. Sophie breathes in the smell of dung and human skin and lets herself smile as she feels her fate turn a corner. Cloaked under her disguise, she makes her way into her tavern. At the bar a blond man with wide hands is laughing, loud, the stool next to him the only one empty in the whole room.

It's a long moment where she does nothing but observe, pinning every individual to the wall with her eyes and sucking the information she needs out of them. From a far distance she can hear the murmur of their thoughts, too remote to parse apart — something she's gotten used to over time, and will eventually manage to control. 

"What's your name?" the blond man asks, tearing her out of her examination.

"Salazar." It comes out like she likes, with a slight hiss that the surrounding chaos only barely conceals. 

He frowns. "What kind of name is that?"

A laugh startles out of her.

 

—

 

There are no coincidences in this world, that much Sophie firmly believes — though the reason why the universe has thought it wise to stick Godric Gryffindor, expert dueler and experter drunk, in her way she will never know. But he serves her purpose and he's not altogether unpleasant, his skin calloused and ruddy, so earnest and filled with violence she almost thinks of kissing him that first night when he tells her about the column of sparks that had torn through his wooden cane and struck a villageboy in the heart.

They're fast friends, walking long-strided through the city that same morning as the grey light peaks: Godric would do anything for a thrill and Sophie has the calm ambition of her reptilian siblings, but together they are the symbiosis of two opposite elements, water and fire.

They pass by a stake, a little woman with sallow skin who isn't interesting enough to burn with the afternoon crowd, going up in smoke at dawn when no one is looking. She turns her eyes on them when they pass, tearful and pathetic, and Sophie feels Godric shiver against her, half from pity and half from fear. She thinks a little less of him. 

A kid playing in the gravel a few paces away is throwing pebbles at the woman boredly, shrieking from the top of his lungs, "Burn the witch!"

Sophie rolls her eyes, smiles, a private joke with herself. "Please. As if they haven't tried."

Godric throws her an inquisitive glance but doesn't ask, like he knows what's good for him, for once. 

 

—

 

Three months into their acquaintance, after he shows her a charm to make light flood out of her wand, shaped like a protective snake coiled around her wrist — _patronus_ , he calls it in his schoolboy, priest-borrowed Latin — she strips away the disguise for the first time. 

He gapes unattractively. Then — "So your name isn't Salazar?"

Sophie rolls her eyes. "For you it is," she says, making him roll it on his tongue as she reels him in, lips parted to better burn him with a kiss.

There's power in a name, after all.

 

—

 

(She doesn't ask him to keep her true form to himself. He will: that's who he is, loyal to a fault, like a dog, a keeper of secrets and a defender of innocents, his righteousness tainted with the faint aftertaste of superstition.)

 

— 

 

Lady Rowena Ravenclaw is thin and sickly-looking, her teeth pearly white from where they surface between bloodless lips. She wants to build a school. 

"A school," Sophie says, unable to keep the disbelief — and slight disdain — out of her voice.

Godric has been fawning over her since they met, topping the pint of ale she drinks from in tiny, discriminating sips, utterly enthralled with her idea. Of course he would like it: teaching kids how to wave their wands around, play and kick each other. Sophie has slightly more elaborate plans. 

Lady Rowena's gaze swivels to her. "Yes. I have the funds, and a castle in —" the location gets drowned into the nearby bustle, which Sophie supposes was intentional, "where we could set our foundations."

 _We_ , Sophie notices, not without a certain satisfaction, but doesn't interrupt. Lady Rowena's attention is focused solely on her, blocking out the noise, enveloping but cold. 

"The idea is to educate our fellow sorcerers. As you have undoubtedly noticed, there is a disturbing lack of unity in our ranks, and I — I am not alone in this belief — feel that we owe it to our talents to create a more... shall we say, united force. And where does strength come from if not education?"

Sophie, with her origin story nestled between the bloody thighs of her cuckolding mother and her rise to success clawed from men's unwilling hands, could probably argue that. She doesn't. 

"Mm," she says instead, giving away nothing. 

"Of course," Lady Rowena continues, undisturbed, "this would come with a generous stipend and access to a various range of literature and equipment." Her pale eyes flash slightly. "Our students would deserve nothing but the best."

She outlines her plans quickly and efficiently, ignoring Godric when his eyes glaze over, partly from the ale and partly because organization has never been his strong fort. Sophie, in her Salazar guise, which she has taken on permanently if not for the raw amusements of Godric's bed, sets her chin on her fist and listens. 

"We'll let you know," she finally tells Lady Rowena at nightfall, dragging Godric out the tavern, but the decision is already made. 

 

—

 

The castle looms over a Scottish-looking landscape, miles upon miles of dewey green surrounding the dark near-ruins. Lady Rowena surveys them with cool satisfaction, talking quietly to their new companion, a happy young woman wearing braids and a large smile called Helga. 

It takes months, and considerable amounts of money seemingly Rowena pulls out of nowhere, for the castle to look even near presentable. She and Sophie spend whole afternoons rigging it with secret passages, melting corridors and twisting stairwells for the pure trickery of it, while in the common room Helga and Godric exchange anecdotes over a meal, and he tries to goad her into a duel while she offers to share apothecary advice.

 _I could take them all without blinking,_ Sophie thinks, just as Rowena asks, "What are you thinking?"

Sophie smiles, serpentine only because the shadows allow it. "How well we will do," she answers smoothly. "How complementary we are. This is a worthwhile endeavor."

Rowena only nods, a slight grin tugging up the corner of her mouth. 

 

—

 

In the end, Godric is the one who forces them onto what the calls their pilgrimage, a weeks-long trek through muddy countryside villages to dig out candidates for the school and promise them year-long food and board if they'll let themselves be taught a few charms and hexes. The process is grudging and slow, but successful, and slowly they fill the ranks of their future empire. 

One night in an inn Sophie lets the disguise fall away and notices with surprise how much she has grown, how old she has gotten while she wasn't looking, striking silver already cutting through the ebony of her hair. Salazar is balding; somewhere along the process she has started to care for more than her share of the profits, for the life or death of that ridiculous rich girl's fairytale. 

Oh, well.

 

—

 

September and the hall is filling, Sophie standing queenly in her high-backed chair, the intimidating Salazar Slytherin to the few students who have met her eye and haven't dared ask her the way to the dormitories. Rowena, obsessed with nobility as she is, has gifted them all heavy and symbolic jewelry, and Sophie fingers the thick ring of silver around her finger, ruby catching the light. 

There are many things to be said about this day: Godric and his thunderous expression, something in him that has soured since he was a seventeen-year-old pissing cheerily in the gutter; the students with their expectant, unschooled faces, looking up at their new professors; the castle, invisible to all that ignore its existence, a perfect haven of peace if there were such a thing; a cold hatred that Sophie feels growing inside her heart, for the people who have wronged her, coarse and devoid of magic. 

She rests back into her chair, smiling a thin sliver of a smile as the sharp clang of Rowena's blade against her crystal glass echoes through the room. 

"Welcome," Godric says in his warm, booming voice, like a leader to an army, "to your new home."

So it begins, Sophie thinks.


End file.
